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New Stories from the South 2026
Not yet published
Expected 6 Oct 26282 pages, Paperback
Expected publication October 6, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
After a 16-year hiatus, New Stories from the South has been revived by Blair Publishing, with Robin Miura as chief editor. As with its predecessors, the anthology sets out to collect some of the best Southern short fiction published during the previous year. Twenty stories are included here, selected from nominations by literary journals and magazines. Most are rooted in the South, although the collection offers a fairly broad range of voices and approaches to contemporary Southern life.
Most of the stories are competent rather than exceptional, particularly when placed alongside the work of established short-story writers. Admittedly, that isn't really the bar this collection is trying to clear. The ambition of this anthology is to bring writers from literary journals closer to the wider publishing world. Short stories have never enjoyed the same popularity as novels, and It’s a deceptively difficult form of fiction in which to achieve greatness. Broadly speaking, I tend to think of them as working in one of two ways. The first offers a glimpse, a vignette, a view through a door, evoking an atmosphere and achieving as much through what is left unsaid as through what is on the page. When successful, such stories leave you wondering what came before and what might follow, and the reader begins to expand the plot and characters in their own imagination. The second type attempts to tell a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and resolution, but must achieve that sense of completeness within a much smaller space. Both approaches are difficult to pull off. The stronger stories in this anthology generally understand what they are trying to accomplish; the weaker ones often seem caught between the two, neither developing enough material for a complete narrative nor creating enough ambiguity or atmosphere to make their brevity meaningful.
Not surprisingly, I found that the more established writers generally fared better technically, with their stories achieving one of these two aims. There are exceptions, however. Tony Earley, arguably the most established and prolific writer in the collection, kicks off the anthology with a particularly snooze-inducing composition that had completely vanished from my mind by the time I reached the last word
Much better was Pritha Bhattacharyya’s “The Problem with Brown People”. A funny treatment of the tensions that arise when Bengali immigrant families try to reconcile inherited traditions with the increasingly liberal attitudes of their children. Two families meet, and their conflicting approaches to raising their sons eventually culminate in a drunken game of spin the bottle—and the discovery of the boys kissing in the basement. At that point, there is presumably no easy way back to the old family arrangements.
“The Fairy Swap” by Emily Harper Ellis stood out an an emotional and magical tale of two sisters living in the rural South. With their mother away receiving treatment for alcoholism and mental illness, the sisters have created their own story: fairies and changelings took possession of her and turned her violent. Their father is largely absent, doing odd jobs to earn a basic income, so the sisters hatch a plan to get her back. It’s a delicate, tender story about grief and loss, viewed through the children’s magical perspective, and it maintains a careful balance. Although narrated through the sisters’ perspective, the story also allows the adult reality to emerge alongside their fairy tale.
The Sanctuary” by Dean Marshall Tuck’ is a Lyrical naturalistic story with evocative passages that transform the wilderness into something approaching a character in its own right. We follow two siblings through the wilderness as the natural world gradually becomes stranger and more ominous, culminating in an eerie, symbolic encounter with something portrayed as supernatural. Like Cormac McCarthy in Outer Dark, Tuck presents nature as both soothing and peaceful at times, before it metamorphoses into an uncanny and menacing theatre for the human mind.
Legacy” by Joanna Pearson deals with memory and remembrance through a daughter trying to reconcile the father she knew and loved with the possibility that he was also tyrannical and predatory toward other women. Protecting his legacy is, in many ways, also about protecting her own memories of childhood and the father she remembers. She is reluctant to see him in a more complicated light because doing so would mean questioning some of the memories and experiences that shaped her
A few other stories are worthwhile, but several of the remaining pieces left very little impression on me. Their prose is competent enough, yet they rarely create either the atmosphere and suggestiveness of a successful vignette or the structural completeness of a fully developed narrative. They are not necessarily badly written, but they never become much more than brief accounts of events.
The result is therefore a distinctly uneven anthology. Only a handful of the twenty stories struck me as genuinely memorable, while many others felt competent but disposable.
Still, I find the concept has its merits. The collection introduced me to writers I would probably never have encountered otherwise. As for the writers I have mentioned above, most have published novels or short-story collections of their own, and I am keen to seek those out. For me, the anthology is more successful as an act of discovery than as a collection of uniformly outstanding short fiction.
Thanks to Jessica at Blair Publishing for providing me with an ARC, with no strings attached.
Most of the stories are competent rather than exceptional, particularly when placed alongside the work of established short-story writers. Admittedly, that isn't really the bar this collection is trying to clear. The ambition of this anthology is to bring writers from literary journals closer to the wider publishing world. Short stories have never enjoyed the same popularity as novels, and It’s a deceptively difficult form of fiction in which to achieve greatness. Broadly speaking, I tend to think of them as working in one of two ways. The first offers a glimpse, a vignette, a view through a door, evoking an atmosphere and achieving as much through what is left unsaid as through what is on the page. When successful, such stories leave you wondering what came before and what might follow, and the reader begins to expand the plot and characters in their own imagination. The second type attempts to tell a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and resolution, but must achieve that sense of completeness within a much smaller space. Both approaches are difficult to pull off. The stronger stories in this anthology generally understand what they are trying to accomplish; the weaker ones often seem caught between the two, neither developing enough material for a complete narrative nor creating enough ambiguity or atmosphere to make their brevity meaningful.
Not surprisingly, I found that the more established writers generally fared better technically, with their stories achieving one of these two aims. There are exceptions, however. Tony Earley, arguably the most established and prolific writer in the collection, kicks off the anthology with a particularly snooze-inducing composition that had completely vanished from my mind by the time I reached the last word
Much better was Pritha Bhattacharyya’s “The Problem with Brown People”. A funny treatment of the tensions that arise when Bengali immigrant families try to reconcile inherited traditions with the increasingly liberal attitudes of their children. Two families meet, and their conflicting approaches to raising their sons eventually culminate in a drunken game of spin the bottle—and the discovery of the boys kissing in the basement. At that point, there is presumably no easy way back to the old family arrangements.
“The Fairy Swap” by Emily Harper Ellis stood out an an emotional and magical tale of two sisters living in the rural South. With their mother away receiving treatment for alcoholism and mental illness, the sisters have created their own story: fairies and changelings took possession of her and turned her violent. Their father is largely absent, doing odd jobs to earn a basic income, so the sisters hatch a plan to get her back. It’s a delicate, tender story about grief and loss, viewed through the children’s magical perspective, and it maintains a careful balance. Although narrated through the sisters’ perspective, the story also allows the adult reality to emerge alongside their fairy tale.
The Sanctuary” by Dean Marshall Tuck’ is a Lyrical naturalistic story with evocative passages that transform the wilderness into something approaching a character in its own right. We follow two siblings through the wilderness as the natural world gradually becomes stranger and more ominous, culminating in an eerie, symbolic encounter with something portrayed as supernatural. Like Cormac McCarthy in Outer Dark, Tuck presents nature as both soothing and peaceful at times, before it metamorphoses into an uncanny and menacing theatre for the human mind.
Legacy” by Joanna Pearson deals with memory and remembrance through a daughter trying to reconcile the father she knew and loved with the possibility that he was also tyrannical and predatory toward other women. Protecting his legacy is, in many ways, also about protecting her own memories of childhood and the father she remembers. She is reluctant to see him in a more complicated light because doing so would mean questioning some of the memories and experiences that shaped her
A few other stories are worthwhile, but several of the remaining pieces left very little impression on me. Their prose is competent enough, yet they rarely create either the atmosphere and suggestiveness of a successful vignette or the structural completeness of a fully developed narrative. They are not necessarily badly written, but they never become much more than brief accounts of events.
The result is therefore a distinctly uneven anthology. Only a handful of the twenty stories struck me as genuinely memorable, while many others felt competent but disposable.
Still, I find the concept has its merits. The collection introduced me to writers I would probably never have encountered otherwise. As for the writers I have mentioned above, most have published novels or short-story collections of their own, and I am keen to seek those out. For me, the anthology is more successful as an act of discovery than as a collection of uniformly outstanding short fiction.
Thanks to Jessica at Blair Publishing for providing me with an ARC, with no strings attached.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
After a 16-year hiatus, Blair has begun publishing short stories by authors affiliated with the American South again. Miura serves as the editor of this anthology, and the fifteen New Stories from the South 2026 that she and her team gather provide “a thrilling map to what the South is right now, and they reveal a deep ache that tells us much about who we are as a region and culture.” House’s introduction quickly (and helpfully so) addresses some apprehensions readers may have about the South: “while there are many Souths, they all make up one vibrant, eclectic, diverse South that is alive and well.” Indeed, history ties the South together; yet the cultural developments that sprawl forth in distinct, non-uniform ways deserve recognition and celebration. This is true of anything good.
Woman from Khao Lak and Asymptotes deserve an honorable mention. In the former, Nelson engagingly arranges the narrator’s changing temporal perspectives. In his removed point of view, the lifeguard tells the story of Diana Byrne elliptically, as though one might share about a person with whom you become more familiar over time. Linearly, mostly. In the latter, a college student uncovers her separated parents’ secrets about the dissolution of their marriage.
The story in third place is Legacy. When a woman contacts Beatrice to meet about her late father’s book collection, the woman confronts the adult daughter with the truth about Benjamin Tuttle’s manipulation. Beatrice is complicit in Benjamin’s abuse of power by burning the evidence in his study. Second place goes to the closing number, Killjoy, which might be the strongest in the collection. The edgy story about young women fighting underground engages the senses, and the writing is sharp. My favorite from the lot is “Sanctuary,” the sibling story written from the perspective of the eleven-year-old younger sister who adores her older brother. He gets into trouble at school for processing the world differently and needs space from his kid sister to find his way. But he loves her.
Overall, I would’ve preferred grittier stories with more variation in the topics, as some felt slightly familiar, even among my favorites. Still, I’m glad for this collection’s revival, and I hope writers and readers find belonging amidst fractured and complicated relationships with our people and place.
I rate New Stories from the South 2026 3.5 stars.
My thanks to Blair and Edelweiss for a DRC.
Woman from Khao Lak and Asymptotes deserve an honorable mention. In the former, Nelson engagingly arranges the narrator’s changing temporal perspectives. In his removed point of view, the lifeguard tells the story of Diana Byrne elliptically, as though one might share about a person with whom you become more familiar over time. Linearly, mostly. In the latter, a college student uncovers her separated parents’ secrets about the dissolution of their marriage.
The story in third place is Legacy. When a woman contacts Beatrice to meet about her late father’s book collection, the woman confronts the adult daughter with the truth about Benjamin Tuttle’s manipulation. Beatrice is complicit in Benjamin’s abuse of power by burning the evidence in his study. Second place goes to the closing number, Killjoy, which might be the strongest in the collection. The edgy story about young women fighting underground engages the senses, and the writing is sharp. My favorite from the lot is “Sanctuary,” the sibling story written from the perspective of the eleven-year-old younger sister who adores her older brother. He gets into trouble at school for processing the world differently and needs space from his kid sister to find his way. But he loves her.
Overall, I would’ve preferred grittier stories with more variation in the topics, as some felt slightly familiar, even among my favorites. Still, I’m glad for this collection’s revival, and I hope writers and readers find belonging amidst fractured and complicated relationships with our people and place.
I rate New Stories from the South 2026 3.5 stars.
My thanks to Blair and Edelweiss for a DRC.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews